Volume 17 No.9

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the Bringing Them Home report. A new book celebrates the efforts of the late Aboriginal activist and leader Rob Riley to redress a litany of wrongs and injustices towards his people.

A new book shows how the history of a technology can be used for exploring some of the key forces and events of an age. The future could have us all living in red zones, and subject to surveillance, police checks and suspended civil liberties.

Traffic chaos suggests a reason Italians are so good at opera. Life in their cities unfolds each day not with the rational continuity of the novel, or the spareness of the short story, but with traditional opera’s volatility and impatience with the mundane.

Deliver Us From Evil, which details atrocious acts of abuse committed by former Catholic priest Oliver O'Grady. The eyewitness testimony is compelling, although nasty allegations are levelled against O'Grady and allowed to stand without substantiation.

Indigenous beliefs were - and are - considered subversive, and therefore suppressed in colonised societies on earth. Zimbabwe's Witchcraft Suppression Act of 1899 was repealed last year as part of Robert Mugabe's heightened reaction against colonialism.

The notion of preventing Islamic influence has strong echoes of the simple Cold War ‘domino theory’. This powerful metaphor and enemy image, popular in the 1950s and 1960s and used to justify US military intervention in Southeast Asia, was later widely criticised for its undeveloped and unstructured generalisations about political systems that are quite different.

The vote in East Timor's presidential election has unified the nation, and given democracy a second change, after the fractious violence of 2006. It underscores the depth of the antipathy towards the Fretilin government after it badly managed the country’s post-independence development and sparked renewed violence last year.

A tradition of disposable clothing has been emerging in the fashion industry for many years, clothing that falls apart easily, garments that you wear twice and then give away. However, we rarely consider what effect this impulsive consumption has on the world's poor.

Was Triple J's Jesus impersonation contest in Melbourne's Federation Square on the day before Good Friday merely a revival of the 'carnivalesque' tradition of playful irreverence that is linked with a destruction and uncrowning related to birth and renewal.

Amnesty International has improved the lives of countless numbers of people wrongly imprisoned for their beliefs, or subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment. Now its decision to abandon its neutral stance on abortion could undermine the effectiveness in its main advocacy work.

The term “atheist” seems too respectable for the position occupied by commentators such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. They are anti-theists, opposed in principle to every last attachment to the divine, leading many to accuse them of a kind of inverted fundamentalism that lacks the core modern virtue of tolerance or respect for others.

It came to light at the Vatican's recent Climate Change Seminar that powerful and vested interests are confusing farmers in developing countries. They are saying that technology will solve their agricultural problems, and that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is good and willed by God.

Science coverage in the media is dominated by boffins and nerds in lab coats . It loses out to “real” stories of politics and economics in the serious broadsheets, magazines and current affairs programs, and to crime and celebrities in the tabloids and to infotainment on TV.

We can only imagine the shelves of an online bookshop to be dustless. But this does not preclude the very real presence of the spirit of a close relative who died two decades before the Internet took hold.